Free to blaspheme… soon. Maybe.

The word is that New Labour may be about to abolish the centuries old blasphemy laws. This is probably the only true victimless “crime” on the statute book, as things stand. More importantly, it is a potentially serious threat to the freedom of speech, which is simply not acceptable in today’s Britain. This comes a month after the High Court ruling against a Christian fundamentalist group that tried to use the law to prosecute the BBC for showing Jerry Springer – The Opera.

Asides from the obvious free speech argument, this episode also highlighted the discrepancies in the law as it stands – that it doesn’t cover theatres or tv and radio broadcasts, and only applies to the Christian god.

The last time the blasphemy law was used successfully was in a 1977 private prosecution by the anti-free speech campaigner, Mary Whitehouse – and arguably it was an anomaly then. No doubt, though, we’ll get another piece by some Bishop before long complaining that the repealing of this law undermines British morality in some way, and conveniently forgetting that this law is an example of what happens when a society is run for the good of one particular religion in the first place: it willingly criminalises those who offer different opinions to their accepted orthodoxy.

Bishop attacks multiculturalism

The recent piece in the Sunday Telegraph by the Bishop of Rochester is yet another misguided intervention by a senior member of clergy. It follows what by now should be a familier path – one from the Right, attacking multiculturalism and misunderstanding the nature of our secular society.

To begin with, it’s simply false to claim that there are “no-go” areas in the UK today – I notice that the Bishop fails to cite which areas he has in mind.

The point the Bishop is trying to argue (one familiar by now) is that Britain should go back to being a Christian country, the implication being that that is its true identity. The claim is that it is the is a ‘Christian character of the nation’s laws, values, customs and culture’ and a ‘Christian vision which underlay most of the achievements and values of the culture’. Big claims, indeed.

However, without even getting involved in a debate as to what is actually meant by these things, and which laws, customs (fox hunting?), culture (football?), “values” and “acheivements” are being referred to, it is enough to ask if it is not possible for a post-Christian society, such as the one we know live in, to also have both “values” and “acheivements”, customs and culture. We can, for example, strive to live up to the values expressed in the European Convention on Human Rights, or in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights (something which the UK government still refuses to sign up to). Our customs and culture are now those of a post-Christian society.

The Bishop claims that Britain has lost its

vision of its destiny which made it great. That has to do with the Bible’s teaching that we have equal dignity and freedom because we are all made in God’s image.

Of course, there is this myth that Britain was “great” and it isn’t any more. I’m not sure when the Bishop thinks that Britain was “great” – 1975? 1875? However, even within living memory, Britain has had an Empire – and whatever happened in those countries, and how and why, and the extent to which it was detrimental or beneficial, none of those things, and none of the motives behind Empire, had anything whatsoever to do with a vision of ‘equal dignity and freedom’, but more to do with a feeling of superiority.

I’m not sure that at any time but in the last fifty or sixty years could anyone claim that “equal dignity and freedom” have ever been Christian values – if they have, they have also been ones that have apparently been forgotten for most of the history of Christianity, and, anyway, are hardly unique to Christianity. The same may be said of the other “values” he claims for Christianity – compassion, justice, humility, sacrifice and service

The real point that the Bishop wishes to make, in fact, is an anti-Islamic one. He wants to portray Christianity – and by default Britain, because in his view the two go hand in hand – as somehow under threat from Islamism (hence ‘It is now less possible for Christianity to be the public faith in Britain’), but which could in fact be hardly be further from the truth.

The fact is that this country is overwhelmingly secular, and it therefore makes no sense to have a ‘public faith’. Its institutions are not somehow intrinsic to a British identity. If Christianity in this country wants to survive, it should do it without State privilege.